Wait, what’s going on? Device not managed? But I didn’t even do anything I swear! Here’s how to fix it, solution found on ask Ubuntu. Open up your NetworkManager config file and change the line managed=false to managed=true. sudo vim /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf Then, restart the network-manager service. sudo service network-manager restart Everything should work fine now.

I know of no clean way to detect an unplugged screen, so I figured I’d force re-detection with a cron job. To detect the monitors I’m using disper, you can get it from the Wheezy and Sid repositories. Let’s open up our crontab. crontab -e If you’re doing this for other users too, you may use sudo crontab -eu username Now add a new entry: 0-59 * * * * DISPLAY=:0.0 disper -ld auto > /dev/null This will automatically detect (-d auto) and list (-l) all monitors every minute. Of course, you can also use xrandr: 0-59 * * * * DISPLAY=:0.

All you have to do is install the General Purpose Mouse interface, GPM. sudo apt-get install gpm As soon as the installation finishes you’re ready to use your mouse.

The main problem was finding a Windows Vista setup disc that fit my needs. It needed to be Home Premium, 64 Bit and German. Luckily, I found this website that provides links to Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. After downloading and trying to burn it in my own ways, I created an ISO disk image from the Vista setup files with a programme called WBI Creator 1.2 and burned it with Windows 7’s Image Burner. After putting the CD into the tray and booting the laptop, you will see the Windows Vista setup appear. Just follow through the instructions on the screen.

If you are using XFCE with GDM and are tortured by the “slow keys”-feature after holding down Shift, you might want to take a look at this: bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=816764 I don’t remember when I had this problem, but I feel it was sitting around as a draft long enough. I hope this can help someone out there! I can’t test it anymore, since I’ve been using MATE for some time now.

A proper DC++ / ADC compatible implementation was one of the more important reasons I got my server. In a graphical environment I use EiskaltDC++ as a client, so I had no experience with text-based DC clients. Today, I finally had time to set up NCurses Direct Connect. First, I compiled it myself. You should always compile things yourself if they aren’t available in your repository. Then I created a new user ’ncdc’ to run the programme. adduser ncdc I created a very basic, simple init.d/ script that executes this line: su -c screen\ -U\ -dmS\ ncdc\ ncdc ncdc This will start NCDC with its own user (giving it limited rights) and in a UTF-8 enabled screen that is automatically detached.

I had a really annoying problem on my laptop: When I wanted to add a printer, the window would freeze at some point and just not respond. I found the solution in a Debian bug report: you have to add the user to the lpadmin group. sudo usermod -aG lpadmin username After that, adding new printers immediately worked and was a matter of a few seconds.

If you want to start something automatically, you can use these commands either after logging in (user startup) or without logging in (system startup). But what if you want to run something from init.d/, you’re going to have to exec it as a specific user. See my previous post on NCDC to see why anyone would ever need that. First off, I had to find out how I’d start a detached screen and execute a command. That was pretty easy: screen -dmS screenname command But since I wanted to create an init.d/ script, I had to change the user with su first - or even better, just execute a command as the user.

Over the course of time I got annoyed by how long it takes to properly install non-latin language support for a browser, so here’s a (hopefully quick) way to get it working. Note: For the changes to take effect, I had to restart my browser. I’m using Chrome 23 on Debian with XFCE. According to Wikipedia’s “Multilingual support (East Asian)”, you need to install these packages for Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. sudo apt-get install ttf-arphic-uming ttf-wqy-zenhei ttf-sazanami-mincho ttf-sazanami-gothic ttf-unfonts-core That worked perfectly for me, let’s move on to Multilingual support (Indic). On my installation I was missing support for Kannada, Telugu, Tibetan, Khmer and Burmese.

Setting default programmes is actually very simple and straight-forward. Open your user’s defaults.list. vim ~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list Add lines formatted like this: <mimetype>=<desktop file> Here are some examples from my file. text/html=sublime_text.desktop text/plain=sublime_text.desktop x-scheme-handler/http=google-chrome.desktop x-scheme-handler/magnet=transmission-gtk.desktop The changes will be applied immediately.